Why can't foreigners speak English?

Euro MPs were mortified to receive an email this morning urging them to sign a written declaration in favour of making English the EU's sole working language. As if this weren't provocative enough, the text , from the mischievous Tory MEP Chris Heaton Harris , carried photographs of George Bush and Margaret Thatcher, and lavished praise on the US and its cultural hegemony.

Not everyone sees it as an April Fool

"I was going to reply in a fury and then I looked at the date," replied a Portuguese colleague. Ah, ze famous British sense of humour! Ha ha!

Not all my constituents see the proposal as an April Fool joke, though. They seethe at the cost of interpreting everything into 22 official languages, and ask why, since almost all Eurocrats can get by in English, and since almost all informal conversations happen in our language, the situation can't be regularised.

There is a short answer to their objection. The right of every citizen to deal with Brussels in his mother tongue is one of the few remaining signs that the EU is an association of states, and not a single polity. Remove multi-lingualism and you simultaneously remove the greatest barrier to superstatery.

In any case, the generalised use of English as the EU's lingua franca has done our language no favours. If you are feeling triumphalist about the spread of Shakespeare's tongue, I suggest you listen to what has happened to it along the way: it has been eviscerated, my friends, traduced, pared down to just 1,500 words. It has been shorn of all adverbs and of every tense except the present. You think we've pulled one over on the French? They'd never have let this happen to the language of Racine. In fact, one of their professors has gone so far as to codify this ghastly cant, in a book called "Don't Speak English, Parlez Globish".

No, let's keep the EU as it is: a Babel of clashing and mutually incomprehensible ideas. What's that? You think multi-lingualism makes it harder to get things done in Brussels? Yes. And your problem with that is…?